Julia E. Sweig is Senior Research Fellow at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. She served as the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) since 2005. Sweig is currently writing a biography on Lady Bird Johnson, to be published by Random House in 2017. She is the award-winning author of several other books, including Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground, (Harvard University Press, 2004) for which she won the American Historical Association Herbert Feis Award for best book of the year by an independent scholar. Sweig has written numerous long form essays and policy reports on Cuba, U.S.-Cuban relations, Brazil's emergence as a global player, and Latin America. She holds a BA from UC Santa Cruz and an MA and PhD from the Johns Hopkins SAIS.